Dragonfly clinches the top prize at the Dinard British & Irish Film Festival

by David Katz

07/10/2025 - Paul Andrew Williams’ unsettling drama has won the festival's main Golden Hitchcock Award, with Mr. Burton and The Damned also among the victors

Dragonfly clinches the top prize at the Dinard British & Irish Film Festival

The jury and winning filmmaker Paul Andrew Williams (© Jean Enders)

The 36th Dinard British & Irish Film Festival concluded at the weekend, allowing its attendees in coastal Brittany to see some of the year’s best new films from across the Channel. With the picturesque town of Dinard decked out in both Union Jacks and Irish flags, as well as novelty red phone boxes lining the main streets, the British cultural theme extends to the name of the awards themselves, which are called the Golden Hitchcocks. Further along the coast from the key festival venues, you can see the unmistakable Victorian facade of the home that inspired Norman Bates’s from Psycho, although the line-up’s typical programming isn't quite so macabre.

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This year’s main competition jury was composed of UK and French cultural luminaries Rupert Everett, Jennifer Saunders, Ruby Wax, Molly Dineen, Rachida Brakni, Reda Kateb and Claire Chazal. Everett was set to be jury president until an urgent family matter obliged him to fly home immediately, and Chazal, a well-known journalist in France, took over the role.

Paul Andrew Williams’ Dragonfly [+see also:
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film profile] was a deserving winner of the Golden Hitchcock for Best Film, continuing a festival run that also saw an acting win following its Tribeca world premiere, and a Karlovy Vary out-of-competition slot. Made modestly in a few key locations, with no involvement from the BFI or UK public broadcasters, it’s an intense, yet sensitive, dramatic two-hander, with Brenda Blethyn as a widowed pensioner in a working-class Yorkshire town, who’s befriended and then cared for by a mysterious younger woman played by Andrea Riseborough. Another critically well-received film from Williams, whose past credits include Bull [+see also:
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trailer
film profile], it’s released in the UK through Conic next month, and the Dinard win will create momentum for further French theatrical exposure.

Of the five-strong competition line-up, the jury also rewarded Harry Lawtey for his performance as a young Richard Burton in Mr. Burton, and awarded the Special Barrière Prize to Thordur Palsson’s The Damned. The latter is a co-production involving several countries, including the UK and Iceland, and with the Nigerian-set My Father’s Shadow [+see also:
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interview: Akinola Davies Jr
film profile] also competing, this fed into the main subject of the festival’s day-long industry programme, which debated “What Determines a Film’s Nationality?”.